Adam Smith Institute

As the largely unwarranted festivities around the 60-year birthday of the National Health Service are dying down, the actual state of healthcare is once again hitting the headlines. Last week the British Medical Association (BMA) called for a thorough and independent review of NHS patients topping up their care. However, the report will not be ready until summer next year.

According to a BBC article on the issue, at present you have two choices. You can either pay for health care that would normally be free, or go without drugs that could help extend your life. They are in fact wrong. For many people the choice has already been made by the state because they cannot afford the first option. At present, lifesaving drugs are cut off from many who cannot afford to pay for healthcare outside of the state system.

Slowly, but too slowly, the ideological disgrace of denying top-up treatment is being realised. The BMA debate was a reaction to a woman dying of cancer who was denied free NHS treatment in her final months because she had paid privately for a drug to try to prolong her life. This is not a health service that that is the envy of the world.
 

A nice piece detailing the new GM foods which are being developed. The first generation of such crops concentrated either on increasing yields or on decreasing inputs, thus raising the profit margins of farmers and thus the quantities grown. All good news of course but not enough to sway the near hysterical opposition to the technology.

The new generation of such foods depends rather more on increasing the nutritional quality of the crop, rather than volume or the reduction of input costs. For example:

Cassava has been packed with new genes that help the plant accumulate extra iron and zinc from the soil, and synthesise vitamins E and A.

Cassava is the basic crop for hundreds of millions (some 800 million) around the world and its nutritional failings are responsible for  the damaging of many lives through under- and mal-nutrition. The addition of those nutrients will help to reduce such problems: that vitamin A will for example stop many cases of blindness.

Sadly, there are those who would oppose even this:

Claire Hope Cummings, a former lawyer with the US Department of Agriculture and author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, published in March, said: “People do not need miracle crops offering enhanced nutrients. What they need is a good varied diet. Who wants to eat a giant bowl of cassava or golden rice each day? These ideas are just a new way of marketing GM.”

It's true that most people do not wish to eat a giant bowl of cassava or rice each day and yes, that they would prefer a varied diet. But that isn't something that's on offer just yet: we need to remind ourselves that life currently offers all too many people all too short a list of options, none of said options being all that enviable and some just plain awful. Like, perhaps, eating a giant bowl of cassava or rice each day or eating nothing each day and thus dying.

The GM cassava, like the golden rice which is also vitamin A enhanced, will allow hundreds of millions to continue living and reduce their risk of going blind while doing so (250,000 children currently blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency and a further hundred million at risk).

I realise that Ms. Cummings (and no doubt others) will disagree with me here but I take that to be 100,250,000 damn good reasons why we should get on with marketing GM.

Back in the old days, dentists were paid a fee for each type of treatment they provided. After a contract change, dentists started receiving their income by doing a certain amount of work, known as “units of dental activity.”

You can imagine the dentist: “I need to do 15 procedures to meet my weekly quota. I could fill all those cavities… but that takes a long time and requires numbing and filling materials. Or I could just pull the tooth out. It takes no time at all and requires no medicine or precious metals.”

The NHS did not think about all this before implementing the new contract. But a damning new report from an influential MP’s committee shows how bad the situation is.

Dentists are extracting patients’ teeth rather than carrying out more complex repair work because NHS reforms have failed… The number of tooth extractions, many of them unnecessary, experts say, has risen since the new contract was introduced. At the same time, the volume of more complex work such as crowns, bridges and dentures has fallen by more than half.

The solution is not to reform the contract again, but to eliminate it altogether. We deserve health care that gets us the best treatment for our needs, but NHS contracts distort the incentive structure in such a way that dentistry works against patients. The NHS being inefficient, working against patients, and distorting the markets? Must be a slow news day if this is news.